Thursday, November 22, 2012

I went into the LDS Third Ward in Farmington, New Mexico. I
could not tuck “my long hair up under a cap” as did poet and environmental
activist Gary Snyder when he ventured into Farmington’s Maverick Bar. I had no
earring to leave in the car. I didn’t drink “double shots of bourbon backed
with beer” (although my traveling bag held a flask of lowland single-malt in
case of emergency). Unlike Snyder, I had an escort, an old friend who explained
where I was from. Instead of “We don’t smoke Marijuana in Muskokie,” the
organist played “For the Beauty of the Earth.” There was no dancing. Otherwise
my experience was exactly like Snyder’s.

Snyder was in the Four-Corners area to protest the rape of Black
Mesa, holy to Hopis and Navajos, black with coal. The corporations prevailed and
the coal was strip-mined and slurried away with precious desert water and the
air of these high, wild, open spaces was so thoroughly fouled that on Thursday,
driving from Cortez to Shiprock, the dramatic volcanic core that lent the town
its name stood veiled, smudged, moodily distant.

I was in the Four-Corners area to revisit my past, John’s
past.

Nearly four decades since I last attended church in my
hometown, more than a decade since I left the Mormon Church, twenty years since
I began my fraternal meditations after John’s death, a week after Barack Obama
was elected to a second term, I went into the LDS Third Ward in Farmington, New
Mexico.

A billboard in southwestern Colorado had shouted at me as I
drove past: SAVE GOD AND AMERICA. It proclaimed that OBAMA HATES BOTH. And it
concluded that I should VOTE ROMNEY.

Utah County, where I live, had just given Mitt Romney 90% of
its votes. San Juan County, New Mexico, where Farmington is located, awarded
63% of its votes to Romney (contrasting with Albuquerque’s Bernalillo and Santa
Fe Counties, which went 56% and 73% for Obama respectively). With the exception
of New Jersey’s Mercer County (Obama 68%), I’ve spent my life among
conservatives.

Farmington’s citizens are conservatives of an isolated sort.
It is 182 miles to Albuquerque. 208 to Santa Fe. 419 to Phoenix. 377 to Denver
(the route my family took that fateful December). 425 to Salt Lake City (from
where Brigham Young sent his son Brigham Young Jr. to colonize Kirtland, New
Mexico, a little farming town just west of Farmington). West Texas, origin of
many of the town’s oil-field specialists and workers, is about 500 miles
distant. At the confluence of the La Plata, the Animas, and the San Juan
rivers, Farmington’s Anglo culture is shoehorned between Latino New Mexico and
the Navajo Reservation.

I haven’t been politically conservative since I left
Farmington. Or did the shift occur when I came home from my German mission? Or
perhaps as I changed my major at BYU from pre-med to German literature and
philosophy? Or when I headed east for graduate work at Princeton?

In any case, I went into the LDS Third Ward in Farmington,
New Mexico with my long, grey hair pulled back into a ponytail just days after
every voting member of this congregation (was there, perhaps, a single
dissenter? two of them?) had voted for their fellow Mormon conservative, and
had done so after fasting and praying for him, sure, or at least hopeful, that
he would save the Constitution and the Country from Socialism or worse! I live
with a partner to whom I’m not married. There’s that problematic flask of
whiskey. I had coffee Saturday at Andrea Kristina’s Bookstore and Kafé in downtown
Farmington. I swear like the roughneck I once was. I’m allergic to authority. I
would gladly be gay if I had those inclinations.

Today I wish I could tuck my hair under a cap.

I pull open the door and gesture to a grey-haired couple to
enter.

Thank you, they both say.

When I did this in the old days, people said thank you young
man, I reply.

You’re not young any longer, the man says.

Doug introduces me to them as the son of my father.

Your dad was our Bishop when we lived here before, the man
says.

We’re greeted by the current Bishop’s two councilors, men in
dark suits and white shirts and ties and with firm handshakes and sincere
smiles that make me think they will not throw me out if they discover I’m an
environmentalist. Two young, male missionaries shake my hand, assess me avidly.
My hair suggests I might be available for conversion.

We find seats in the back row next to our old friend Craig.
He’s the only man in the building not wearing a tie. I get too hot, he says.

Tyra plays opening chords on the organ and I join the congregation,
maybe 150 white people, in singing a hymn about the earth’s beauty. Although I
no longer believe there’s a god to thank for that, I am thankful for the earth
and smile when I realize I still remember many of the words. It feels good to
sing again, to “join the congregation.” And they are not all white, as I
supposed – a young Native American, 12 or 13, sits with the deacons in front of
the sacrament table.

A vigorous young woman rises to give the invocation (women
were not allowed to pray in sacrament meeting when I was young). Heads bow all
around me and I find my own head slightly bowed as well. I watch the woman as
she invokes “Our Dear Heavenly Father,” her eyes screwed shut, focused intently
on what she is saying. She thanks the Lord for the Veterans “who we honor on this
Veterans’ Day.” She slips into a well-worn groove to ask that God “bless the
leaders of our Church and the . . . and the leaders . . . and the leaders of
our Nation.”

Although the election is still very much with her, in the
end, bless her heart, she fights through the disappointment (and anger?) and
completes the blessing.

While a Master Sergeant in splendid uniform speaks
extemporaneously and emotionally about how his duty in Viet Nam stripped him of
religious beliefs, faith he regained slowly when he found and joined the
Mormons, I think about the flat plaque on my father’s grave halfway out the
Aztec Highway. Paid for by the Veterans Administration, placed in a noisy
corner below a busy highway in a sterile cemetery designed without gravestones
to make grass cutting easier, it says BOB WALTER ABBOTT / 1ST LT US ARMY /
WORLD WAR II / 1925—1977. That’s it. No mention of loving father and husband. Of
fine teacher and good principal and compassionate Bishop. His epitaph is
elsewhere, I tell myself, in our “Books of Remembrance,” in our collections of
photographs, in these pages.

John’s gravestone stands in a more inviting spot, atop a
hill in American Fork, Utah. Fraternal hands are carved into bright grey
granite – and into these meditations.

A woman sitting in front of us rubs her teenaged son’s back,
a gesture repeated in other pews. A husband stretches an arm around his wife’s
back. Families snuggle together while a speaker drones comfortably on about a
new, inspired curriculum for youth classes (“There will be no more ‘stand and
deliver’ but interaction and shared responsibility”). I try to imagine John in
this warm setting, a 61-year-old arm around his husband’s shoulder, happy to
have rejoined the congregation that sent him on his mission to Italy.

I can’t picture it. Not in my lifetime.

On Friday, The
Atlantic published an analysis of racist tweets shortly after President
Obama was declared the winner of a second term. After Alabama, Mississippi, and
Georgia, the good citizens of Utah were the fourth worst offenders.

We sing “Count Your Blessings,” one of Dad’s favorites, and
I cheerfully join in the bass line that marches eighth notes (“count your many
blessings”) across the syncopated soprano line (“count —— your blessings”).

Sacrament meeting over, I follow Doug across the gym into a
large classroom. People still greet him as “Bishop,” formal in their hierarchy,
grateful for his service. The room fills with men and women, maybe 60 of us,
almost everyone holding a set of scriptures. Christ’s visit to the Americas
after his resurrection as told in TheBook of Mormon will be the text for
today’s class. Doug is a born teacher, as erudite as he is sensitive to the
problem of too much erudition in this diverse and provincial group.

Provincial. That’s the word that best describes my sense for
the town I drove into on Thursday. I was without sophistication when I left for
college in 1967 and thus, logically, must have come from an unsophisticated
town. Farmington is nearly twice the size it was then, approaching 50,000
inhabitants, and it now has a two-year college. Still, over the years, thinking
about Doug as a hometown lawyer, I have always thought that he was stuck in a
backwater.

Cosmopolitan. That’s the word that best describes the new
sense I have for Doug after the mental explosion provoked by poking around in
his downtown law office. It’s an insight I might well have expected had my
thought not coalesced around an inevitably false and self-serving image. In
high school we frequented the school library in tandem and as college roommates
I was jealous of Doug’s passion for Shelley and Keats. I knew he had spent two
years speaking Quechua and Spanish in Bolivia. He had been a U.S. Marine for
four years and had won two blackbelts in karate. But until the explosion
occasioned by seeing Doug’s books I had him pegged as a small-town lawyer who
had reverted to the provinces. While I, in contrast, . . .

The rooms of Doug’s law office contain, of course, those
leather-bound books in glass-fronted cases meant to lend a sense of prosperity
and sagacity to their owners. There are shelves and shelves of law books, various
tools of the trade. The rest of the books, however, testify to intellectual
curiosity of the best sort. Most of them have obviously been read (excluding a
pristine copy of Heidegger’s Being and
Time). There is a long shelf of books about Navajo language and culture.
Several shelves of military history. Books about knots. Dozens of books about
knots! Innumerable field guides to birds and animals. Entire bookcases devoted
to philosophy and theology. A dozen translations of the Bible. Mormon books sprinkle the shelves, including twenty-two
volumes of the Journal of Discourses,
balanced by Meister Eckhart and St. John of the Cross and Thomas Merton and
Martin Buber and Bertrand Russell’s Why I
Am Not a Christian. There is lots of poetry. Shakespeare in abundance.
Dictionaries galore: Spanish, Spanish/English, Spanish/English Legal
Dictionary, Spoken Spanish, Navajo/English, French/English, Latin Verbs, a
reverse dictionary, a poet’s dictionary, a usage dictionary, Bible dictionaries, a bibliophile’s
dictionary, literary terms, the Oxford
English Dictionary, law dictionaries, dictionaries of quotations,
crossword-puzzle dictionaries, dictionaries of etymology, and a whole raft of
thesauruses. Armed with such books, Doug has written three dissertations: one for
a Doctorate of Juridical Science in Taxation at the Washington School of Law,
and two for Doctorates in Theology and Ministry at the Faith Christian
University.

And it’s not all academic. Tyra dug
out dozens of film reviews in the local paper, a set of poems published in a
weekly column, and numerous “Guest Commentaries” by “F.Douglas Moeller, a
Farmington attorney and poet” or, alternately, “a Farmington attorney and
writer.”

This man in front of the adult
Sunday School class in the Farmington Third Ward, this man with the gentle mien
and soft, precise voice, this father of four and advocate in various tribal and
state and regional courts, this collector of knives and guns and canes and
masks, this provincial friend of mine is no provincial.

The part of the Book of Mormon Doug is teaching today raises interesting questions
related to the text – why, for instance, does Jesus quote the King James
translation of Isaiah, or what about the multiple Isaiah’s Biblical scholars
can identify? – but for the most part members of this class want direction for
their lives, succor for their wounded souls, reassurance that they are God’s
children. That’s exactly what they get. Doug asks for any last questions or
comments, then bears his testimony as to the truthfulness of the Gospel.

While someone prays I remember Snyder’s reference to
“short-haired joy” and think, of the members of this American Church, that “I
could almost love you again.”

12 November 2012

I spent the
afternoon and night with my sister Carol in Dolores, Colorado. She’s as
beautiful as she always was, excited about the Veterans’ Appreciation Assembly
her fifth-grade students will help with today. It’s ten degrees Fahrenheit when I begin my drive up the
canyon toward Telluride – one degree as I drive through the little mining town
of Rico, ten degrees again when I drive into Telluride, busy with preparations
for the ski season. Mose Allison sings from the CD player, a song by Duke
Ellington and Bob Russell whose refrain has always puzzled me: “do nothing till
you hear from me / and you never will.” I listen closely to the story of
separated lovers and of rumors of lost love. He sings of new experiences (“other
arms may hold a thrill”) and yet, paradoxically, professes enduring
faithfulness. “Do nothing till you hear it from me / And you never will.” “It,”
missing in the lines that perplex, would be the statement that he is untrue in
his heart, that he no longer loves her. Love is both complex and perplexing.

This is my
song, I think, Gary Snyder’s song.

In Paonia I
find the little log house we lived in till I was five, then race along the
still ecstatic highway to Green River, and finally, after descending the dangerous
highway snaking down Spanish Fork Canyon, ease down the dark driveway from
which Lyn has shoveled a foot of heavy snow, home again.

Monday, November 19, 2012

[. . . just four days after this photo, we woke up to see this buck resting in an oakbrush grove just west of our house. He was still there in the early afternoon and we wondered if he had had a long night in an alfalfa field and was now chewing his cud. By late afternoon he was lying on one side, breathing hard. A little later he jerked his head back and stuck his nose up, antlers dug into the ground. An hour later he died. His body is still warm. His open eye is glazing over. I'll bury him in the morning. We've got no idea what the cause of death is, but we're heavy-hearted here tonight.]

[ . . . the next morning. an officer from the state wildlife division came this morning and took a close look. there was no gunshot or arrow wound. instead, the deer had swollen feet and bloating and lots of hair loss -- in all likelihood a victim of epizootic hemorrhagic disease. hope he impregnated some of those does so he'll live on.]

Saturday, November 10, 2012

Punctum Books, out of Brooklyn, has just agreed to publish American versions of two books published in Belgrade by Zarko Radakovic and myself.

REPETITIONS

VAMPIRES

&

A REASONABLE DICTIONARY

Here's the text that bridges between the two texts that make up the second volume:

In
the summer of 1998, Peter Handke, Scott Abbott and I traveled together through
Yugoslavia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Several months before this trip, I
thought that along the way Scott and I could continue the joint travelogue that
we started in our book Repetitions.
That book resulted from reading Handke’s book Repetitions – and Scott and I
traveling together through the “geography of the novel,” intending to “verify”
just how much the narration in Handke’s book corresponded to the “reality” of
the described “locations.” Now that Scott had become Handke’s translator too,
having translated and published Handke’s A
Journey to the Rivers, I felt it would be worthwhile to go to the geography
of that book – we, Handke’s translators, traveling together with our author.
And we would write another double manuscript. Again we would be One looking
through two different optics. That way – we thought – what was Seen and
Experienced would be enriched. And I again – as I had with Repetitions – made the proposal. We got ready for the trip. And we
set off on the journey. Scott, as always, was efficient. He noted down every
detail “on the ground.” I, as often when traveling with Peter Handke, wrote
down as little as possible and let myself surrender to experiences that I would
later repeat. But this time Repetition became lost in Experience. As soon as
our trip ended, new events followed each other at breakneck speed. So much that
was new. The country continued to break up: a takeover was portended in what
remained of the state; NATO intervention loomed on the horizon and soon came; I
traveled to the US; I moved; my closest friends fell ill; I withdrew inside
myself and fell silent; I left my job. All the new things I experience during
that period before and after the trip with Handke and Scott simply buried the
experiences that were to be the basis of our writing a book together. My
manuscript developed into another story. The connection with Scott’s text took
on new dimensions. I suddenly took Scott’s manuscript as a crucial context in
which the book Vampires arose.
Instead of keeping a distance with regard to my partner’s text, regarding is as
parallel to what I was writing and another way of looking at our joint reality,
I kept going back to my friend’s manuscript. I suddenly experienced the reading
of Scott’s text as a solid part of myself. The danger arose: instead of a
writer, I would remain a reader. Consequently, I had to remove myself from that
reading material. I had to write. But repeating what my traveling companion had
already written seemed impossible to me. Owing to the proximity of my friend’s
text, owing to the intensity of the new experiences. Consequently, I had to
write something new. I started writing the novel Vampires. Today I experience Scott’s writing as an extremely
important environment for my novel. Because if there was anything I wanted in Vampires, it was a description of the
time and space in which we lived in 1998 before the NATO intervention in
Yugoslavia, which made us all suffer so much, which changed us essentially. I
thought, if Scott has already recorded everything so convincingly, shouldn’t it
be up to me to do some storytelling. In my case, there was no longer any
question about a travelogue. All I could do was take what already existed as a
travelogue, Scott’s manuscript, and insert it into my book. That is what I have
done.

***

The year Žarko and I traveled up the
Drina River with Peter Handke – between the wars – was a nearly fatal span for
my dear friend. The events of the same year may have saved my life.

I remember standing next to Žarko in
front of an audience at the university (was it his first visit or his second?).
I had invited him to speak to German-speaking students in my seminar on his
work with Peter Handke. For two hours he had engaged them, delighted them,
questioned them – all in German (which is the language he and I share – we’re
both foreigners when we’re together). Now he was to address an audience that
didn’t understand German. I was to be the interpreter. I was to say “I” and
mean “Žarko.”

It was 1992 (the first visit, then).
Žarko’s lecture was so personal, so elegiac (tragic) that I stood transfixed
even as I repeated in English the words my friend spoke in German:

Approximately
fifteen years ago I left my country. Back then, in 1978, it called itself the
Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. In late autumn as I left the Belgrade
train station to travel to what was then the Federal Republic of Germany, I
didn't have the least suspicion that in fifteen years, that is, now, my country
would no longer exist. . . .

[He/I
continued]

Can I, in the
midst of these tragic events, appear as an “omniscient narrator”? Can I, as an
isolated writer, produce stories? Can I, as a writer in this situation, react
publicly, draw conclusions, show emotions, move about freely, take part in
discussions? Can I write about this brutal present at all?

Years later, Žarko answered those
questions with his novel Vampires.
The answer, of course, is no. He can’t appear as an “omniscient narrator.” He
can’t produce stories. He can’t draw conclusions. The answer, of course, is
also yes. He can, in fact, write about this brutal present. Or better said: He
can write this brutal present. That writing – that tortured, broken, but not
un-dead writing – questions narration. It undermines stories. It deflates
conclusions.

The
tremendous costs such writing exacted on my dear friend weighed heavy on me as
I tried to write my own text in the context of a country split so brutally that
it now required a Serbian dictionary and
a Croatian dictionary. How could I possibly put what I experienced with Žarko,
in Žarko’s homeland, into sentences?

What I did know was that my own life
was in danger – my emotional life, my future life, my spiritual life (no, not
my spiritual life, I no longer wanted a spiritual life). If I couldn’t somehow
write my way out of the drying cement of my life. . . .